PUBLICATION - 'NME' or New Musical Express ORIGIN - UK DATE OF PUBLICATION - 16th March, 1991 SUBJECT - Live concert review, UNIVERSITY OF EAST ANGLIA, UK. TITLE - OH WHAT A LA-VER-LEE RAW! AUTHOR - Stuart Bailie Photo - Derek Ridgers Lee wears a shiny nylon jacket that's on loan from the Sir Alf Ramsey estate, and cheesy sports pants that look as if they could walk home on their own. He doesn't say a word -I mean zip- throughout the show, and he turns his back on us regularly. So now we've got the objectionable bits out of the way.... The rest is a rare and lovely thing, a gang of reticant yahoos and one King-talent street-poet, wrestling with the job of making those fine tunes rage and twirl and levitate outside any of your normal cheap expectations. People say that Lee is either precious or lazy (make up your minds, f---wits!), but it's become manifest that these songs are worth  all the tons of grief and introspection and the endless re-tuning. After the gig, we mooch around the band's dressing room and try to give off an inconspicuous vibe (a hard one, since we're the only ones that aren't stoned out of our gourds and don't have accents that can hack their way through huge mountain ranges). But all the time we're earwiggin' to Lee and his mates and what they thought of the show. Lee is typically miffed, he liked playing the accoustic guitar, and the soft textures it gave off, but then he was beat when it came to playing lead breaks. Also, the mic wasn't giving off the warm, mucky sound he'd been going for. And the band wasn't as profoundly tuned into the music as he'd wanted. Nobody else I met had any big reservations. Sure, The La's will never be stand-up comedians or the most demonstrative folk, but this music does send you places. There's a great physicality to it, like when Lee's bro Neil biffs away at the drums during 'Failure'. He's got this little kit, but there are hardly any mics there, and the low decibel La's style means you can directly pick up every collision between muscle wood and steel. You really catch the guts of the music coming through. Lee will rap on about this feeling of unison - he calls it the pulse - a mystical experience that arrives when The La's all hit that special groove at the exact time. I got it off 'There She Goes' tonight and so did a couple of hundred others. It was magical, a huge thing of rapture. if they can learn to sustain this over a long while, The La's would be world shakers. The other thing that gets blasted away tonight is the theory that Lee is hung up on writing 'that difficult 13th song'. There are half a dozen songs tonight that haven't been released, and they're all worth their stuff, a bonkers instrumental after the grateful Dead called, 'Swashbuckler', a flaming flamenco exercise (Callin' All) and a yearning epic sung by John that took the wired-up angsty quality of The Boys' 'First Time' and put in some of Roy Orbison's operatic noodlings for good measure. Loved it. The La's are alright then. We got the pulse and it was wonderful, and we forgave Lee's dodgy line in fashion and his unceremonious stagecraft. Like he sings on one of his mega singles, open your mind. Stuart Bailie.